Colleges Slashing Professor Hours Because Of Obamacare

Many colleges are cutting back on the number of hours worked by adjunct professors, in order to avoid new requirements that they provide healthcare to anyone working over 30 hours per week. This is terrible news for a lot of people; 70 percent of professors work as adjuncts and many will now have to cope with a major pay cut just as requirements that they buy their own health insurance go into effect. …

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen serious unintended consequences from Obamacare, and it’s unlikely to be the last. It’s already become painfully obvious that the law’s creators failed to think through its full implications.

But beyond alerting us to one of the many problems that implementing Obamacare will cause, this news provides a depressing look at the underbelly of the academy. Universities are citadels of blue model thinking and most faculty members are relentlessly liberal in their politics. But the reality is that these same universities are some of the nastiest and most exploitative employers in America. The exploitation of adjuncts is an ugly feature of contemporary American academic life, and the smug complacency about it among many beneficiaries of the two tier system should remind us all that moral hypocrisy can co-exist with impressive degrees.

So not only is Obamacare driving up the cost of health insurance, but it’s also causing a serious decline in income for many Americans.

Whoever named this thing the “Affordable Care Act” had quite the sense of humor.

Truth be told, I wonder if this reduction in hours worked wasn’t intentional. A shorter work week has long been an agenda item for the far-left and labor movements, and it appears they may be getting that. By setting the threshold for mandatory health insurance coverage at 30 hours, Obamacare has provided a big incentive for employers to cut back hours. That threshold was 40 hours a week, beyond which employers were obligated to pay additional costs such as overtime.

Now 30 hours a week may be the new limit, especially with the cost of providing health insurance going through the roof.

Rob Port is the editor of SayAnythingBlog.com. In 2011 he was a finalist for the Watch Dog of the Year from the Sam Adams Alliance and winner of the Americans For Prosperity Award for Online Excellence. In 2013 the Washington Post named SAB one of the nation's top state-based political blogs, and named Rob one of the state's best political reporters.